Friday 18 March 2011 20.05 EDT
First published on Friday 18 March 2011 20.05 EDT

The rolling landscape between Birmingham and the Welsh borders is a literary terrain that has inspired AE Housman, Laurie Lee and Dennis Potter. It may also come to be known as Tim Pears country. Pears's debut, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, evolved from memories of his grandfather's farm in the Welsh Marches, and he has steadily produced a corpus of finely wrought novels celebrating what he describes as "a passing breed of heroic men and women: the rural freemen of England".

Pears's previous novel, Landed, explored this landscape in literal fashion. To give credence to the story of a father who absconds with his children, Pears undertook a research trip through Shropshire on foot, sleeping rough and skinning rabbits. The new novel takes a similar route, albeit in the slightly more commodious form of an old Morris Traveller.

Thirteen-year-old Theo is travelling with his academic parents from Oxford to a Christmas gathering on his grandparents' estate. Grandfather Leonard is a successful market gardener whose blue-blooded wife Rosemary is not long for the world, and has summoned the clan together to enact an important piece of business.

In contrast to Landed, which was a rugged, stylistically adventurous work composed of police reports, medical papers and a shifting cast of poverty-line narrators, Disputed Land seems to be a conscious attempt to resurrect the form and tempo of the country house novel. At times the pace feels impossibly sedate as the narrative dawdles through the various arrivals: arrogant Uncle Johnny with his obnoxious, privately educated twins Xan and Baz; cousin Holly, who is Theo's age and developing womanly attractions; and gentle Auntie Gwen, who unexpectedly arrives with a crop-haired, sharp-suited female partner with whom she announces that she plans to bring up a baby.

The interaction of these characters is explored through a round of family entertainments, party-pieces, charades and signature dishes, whose outcomes seem to be so inconsequential that when Theo postulates: "But take Scrabble . . ." you think, crikey – do we have to? The pace eventually picks up when the fundamental business of the gathering is revealed and each of the adult children is issued with coloured stickers and requested to mark the items of furniture they wish to inherit. Suddenly civil war breaks out with antiques and sticky-backed plastic.

Gradually one becomes more aware that the action may be motivated by Pears's ecological concerns. The precarious state of the planet is indicated by the manner in which the family's speciality apple-growing business has been usurped by GM crops and container shipping; and Grandmother Rosemary delivers several thunderous jeremiads against long-haul travel and over-population. Her dire predictions are borne out by the fact that Theo appears to recollect these events from a point in the future at which he is forced to burn his grandfather's library for fuel.

Pears's fiction often has a post-apocalyptic feel: the fugitive journey of Landed appeared to take place between divided city-states protected by their own security forces. Here he draws a distinction between men of action, such the ruthless speculator Uncle Johnny, whose actions hasten the destruction of the countryside, and the introspective men of reflection, such as Theo's father, who allow it to happen. His recollection is coloured by a sense of guilt that he himself may have not done enough.

Pears has stated that there are two primary subjects for fiction: war and families. By showing a family at war, Disputed Land suggests that the issues affecting the world at large can be captured in microcosm: "A single family can no more sort out its legacy than society can." Yet it is by no means clear whether the domestic drama is substantial enough to support the weight of this argument. Theo counts the jars of preserves on the table and notes: "Grandma hadn't made any this year. We were already living on her reserve supplies, just as she was." An ominous portent of ecological catastrophe? Or simply an indication that one, rather self-absorbed family has found itself in a bit of a pickle?